Monday, October 18, 2010

Overall TEC 2010 Europe in Dusseldorf Germany was pretty cool. I enjoyed the speakers reception on Sunday night and got to meet some folks from the SharePoint side some of whom are even interested in FIM and one of them bought my book!

For the first time I was able to bring my wife along to TEC! We enjoyed some good time in Dusseldorf including seeing Schloss (Palace) Benrather.

Monday we started off with a keynote from Uday Hegde and Mark Wahl on the future of Directory and Identity Technologies. It was mostly an overview and demo of the various MSFT Identity technologies, FIM, RMS, ADFS etc. I did enjoy Mark’s well prepared video demo. He clearly had practiced the timing quite well, explaining as the mouse moved across the screen carrying out his demo.

I spent some time in the solution lab taking a look at Quest’s newest acquisition, Active Entry (part of the Voelcker acquisition). It is quite an exciting product, with Role Mining, and RBAC capabilities. More on that at another time.

I loved Brian Komar’s presentation on how to screw up your PKI. I know he has titled the other way but if you take your notes the wrong way then he is teaching you how to screw up. But if you study it the right way it is quite an insightful look into how to avoid huge mistakes!

For the next session to attend it was a close call between “Claims Provisioning and the Cloud” by Mark Wahl and Andreas Kjellman and attending Joe Kaplan’s “Add LDAP and Two-Factor Auth to ADFS v2”. I chose to attend Joe Kaplan’s session. it really was quite interesting to see the tact he took to add in LDAP auth and two-factor. Even funnier was how Joe revealed his grand deception that his two factor authentication component was accepting any password.

After lunch I skipped Jeremy Palenchar’s awesome session on Logging and Auditing with FIM (I saw it in LA back in April) in order to relax for my care and feeding of identity databases. As always presenting at TEC is great fun. I gave away a few copies of FIM Best Practices Volume 1 in the session. Then Brad Turner spoke in FIM and ILM High availability.

Monday nights reception was great fun. I had quite a thrill talking to so many readers of blog and book.

Tuesday morning I enjoyed Mark Wahl’s presentation on Integrating FIM into IT Service Management. While it was geared towards using Service Center Service Manager as a data warehouse, the thought of integrating automated Identity Management with help desk and asset management is quite intriguing. Then Brad spoke about Applying FIM Policy retroactively with ROPU “Run on policy update” which we refer to as Rope You.

I attended part of Jackson Shaw’s Evolution of the Identity Market. He had a fascinating story of how the destruction of one company’s directory led to the meta directory concept.

After lunch I delivered my session on FIM Performance Tuning. It was a bit surreal but I was asked to personalize several copies of FIM Best Practices Volume 1.

I enjoyed being able to attend Andreas Kjellman’s how to avoid a FIM support call. I thought the feedback about the common support items was invaluable.